Sponsorship and History

As some of you will know, I am a big fan of Formula 1. I have watched it from a very young age and grown up watching the cars change dramatically over the last 25 or so years.

I was watching the first few races this season, when I was struck by a question. You see, the Lotus cars this year (formerly Renault) have changed to a black and gold colour scheme. This clearly is a reference to their classic 70's colour scheme from when they dominated F1 for several years.

The only issue is though, the 70's car was called the John Player Special. A sponsorship that wouldn't be allowed now. So just how old and how subtle does sponsorship and branding have to be before it loses relevance?

I was born many years after the JPS car, yet I still know it by that name. So when that car appears in the same colours I inherently link it back to the old cigarette sponsored car. Even though it has no logos or other markings that resemble the brand.

A decade or so ago Ferrari were banned from using white and black barcodes on their car instead of the Marlboro logo in places where tobacco sponsorship was then banned. They were told it was still branding. Likewise Jordan putting Buzzing Hornets instead of Benson and Hedges.

Well isn't reviving the colours of a cigarette brand named car just the same?

Would such a sponsorship be illegal under the current rules? I would have thought so, but if Marlboro paid McLaren to go back to their red and white stripes, but with no mention of Marlboro anywhere, what would happen? Could McLaren argue it is their heritage colour and not a sponsor colour? That would have to be the justification from Lotus if challenged too, surely?

Then if we follow the argument logically, is Santa appearing in Red and White a case of advertising Coca Cola to children? The red and white colours are from Coke's historical advertising, and as an HFSS product that kind of branding and brand colour usage wouldn't be allowed.

Where and how do we draw an acceptable line I wonder? After how many years does sponsorship become heritage, and when does it lose relevance to the former sponsor?

Images from: http://www.manipef1images.com and www.pistonheads.com

Soft but Tough

I thought that I was starting to get a little fed up with the spate of ads that show a sweet life story of someone growing up. John Lewis made it work fantastically, Google did it well, so have P+G, enough surely?

Well no. This is no lemon.

The new VW Polo ad is magnificent. It keeps the sense of humour their work has always had, but melds it together with a story and heart that would move a stone.

It keeps the legendary 'Small but Tough' idea and takes it somewhere new, arguably topping the John Lewis and Google work. This is beautiful story telling, the kind that will stick with people for a long time, rather like the iconic Changes ad, taking a moment of life and building up to it in a way that makes the strategic idea central to everything that happens. If you go into it knowing what the ad is for then the ending is obvious, but it doesn't really matter.

The music is fantastic, and sets the mood perfectly. It doesn't dominate the track like with the John Lewis ad, it soundtracks it, leaving the focus on the people and the idea. The direction stops it being cheesy too, and makes it feel like a real family. Whether parents will be persuaded to buy a Polo for their kids is another question, but that doesn't really matter. Watching this ad creates a huge warm glow around the car and the brand that will doubtlessly bring people to the showroom.

I was thinking the other day it's been a few years since I remember there being a great VW ad (2009's Like a Golf ad), that clock can be set back to zero now. Now how on earth do you top this?

Think I've over sold it? Just watch.

Derby Day Politics

Why do I want United to win the derby tonight? Well it's partly because they are my local club now, partly because I admire their style of play, and partly for an unusual third reason... victory for City will be a victory for David Cameron and the principles of the Tory government.**

City is a team built on foreign money, using the Real Madrid Galacticos principle of buy the most expensive players you can find. Money over team spirit, over hard work and over passion. (I'm not saying the fans don't have passion of course)

You see, even Margaret Thatcher and all her miner hating, poor bashing, divisive horror was at least built on a principle of hard work. If you work hard you deserve to be rewarded. Cameron however lacks even that simple piece of morality, his work is based on 'the wealthy are deserving, the poor are not', which can also be taken as 'The South is deserving, the North is not'.

A City win backs that vacuum of principles, that money is good, that you can buy victory with inherited wealth, as opposed to the long term effort and hard work that personifies Manchester United, and used to be there at City too. The same moral black hole that stop lots of people from cheering for Chelsea, even as the only British team in Europe. It's why I will always want Barcalona to beat Real Madrid, even when Mourinho is their manager.

I don't begrudge the long suffering City supporters their day in the sun, I'd just prefer that day to come about through teamwork and determination, not through a transfer schedule that makes 15th Century land owners look considerate.

So just like Ed Milliband, United may not be perfect, but as long as it means stopping Cameron he can be 100% assured of my vote. Come on you reds.

(**Note - Please don't take this too seriously!)


Also - At work we have created a tweet derby day battle! Join in by using the hashtags #derbyred and #derbyblue - The live scoreboard is up on the CBJWT website here

The Experience Gap

Helping out on New Business work has made me more aware than ever before about the Experience Gap, and just how damaging and silly it can be. This is something that I find a worrying number of tenders are including, and also something that agencies as employers can too often do themselves.

It starts with that moment where someone raises their hand and says "Whoever we pick probably should have worked for a company like us in the last few years". Cue a few nods and a clause in the tender.

Except what happens when everybody does it? You end up in a situation where agencies are trapped out of working on a particular sector by lack of experience, with no way of gaining that experience. I have literally seen in two years, 5 tenders in one sector ALL of which mandate recent experience. It turned out to be a sector we had done some great work on, but because it was a little too old it didn't count.

How ridiculous.

There must be a small  circle of agencies solely working on this one sector, with everyone else unable to get involved no matter how skilled. This misses out both on the talents of some great great agencies, as well as bypassing the fact that an agency without direct experience can offer a fresh viewpoint, and not be bogged down by convention.

It's very annoying, but we do the same. When I first looked to get into advertising, I met a guy at Grey during a graduate event, who told me I should become a planner. I asked him when they did graduate planning recruitment, the answer was "we don't"... and nor did anyone else.

So how do you get into a job when there are no real entry points? You have to get an agency to take a risk, and in the current climate that's an unlikely thing to convince a finance director to do.

Maybe there's an upside though, because it encourages people who want to get into our industry to be tenacious, to work hard and be sure they want the job; if you work in adland the odds are you damn well earned your place here. Sure as an industry we need to improve in many things, hire more risky people, be more racially and culturally representative, stop seeing people over 50 as past it... but I believe we'll get there, or else I'll be trying damn hard to change it.

Now if only we can get that minority of tender authors to see the value that an agency without direct experience can bring.

Tipp-Extraordinary

A lot is said these days about the overuse of, mis-prescribed importance of, and death of (as a statistic) engagement. But like most terms, they are always right in some cases, and used badly too often. Engagement itself doesn't mean much on it's own, it's about how that engaged time makes you feel or what it makes you remember.

Now this new work from Tipp Ex is the very definition of engaging comms. It doesn't feel like ad comms at all, it has a silly central premise that gives you a small box and invites you to play around, and other than setting up the box it barely even mentions the product.

20 seconds isn't a score for measuring engagement, but 20 minutes spent playing with a brand produced activity? That's engagement in a context that is relevant.
There is little arguing with the finished product. A relatively low budget piece of work that drags you in and gives you content that makes you want to share it. No need to white-out that.

Time to Entertain

Depending on your viewpoint, in-game purchasing has become a gigantic opportunity/pain in the backside with mobile games. Mostly I hate it, because you get huge percentages of new games that are no longer set up to provide a fun experience the whole way through, they are set up to drive revenue at the expense of gameplay.

A lot of parents are complaining about 'free' games that then bombard kids with requests to buy more too, while most regular gamers feel cheated by unfairly hard games that charge you for better cars, or games that make you pay for every single level, or use coins that are collected so sparingly it drives you to want to shortcut the process by buying. To me, and many others this process of sales over gameplay is wrong.

It's not like you buy a full game and pay for an expansion, it makes you feel tricked and like the developers are being deliberately dishonest and deceitful.

Part of this is the new culture of cheap games started by the iPhone and Android stores, people expecting that games should cost £2.99 and no more, regardless of how many people worked on it and how long for. This means that smaller developers often need to find extra finances. Though I maintain creating a great game will always benefit you more in the long run than creating a great in-game sales mechanic.

What this does say to me however, is that the opportunity for brands to develop and involve themselves with games has never been greater.

If you are a brand, you can develop a full, fun game as part of your budget that drives awareness, engagement and eventually sales. You can develop games to be FUN, not to drive in game purchases; which, if done well, could actually lead us to something new: brands creating games that are more fun than non-branded games.

The cheaper alternative of course is to do what we were talking about several years ago, sponsor these downloads and show the brand in a giving light. E.g.: This 200 coin pack has been bought for you by XXXX.

While many developers and publishers are trying to twist mobile gaming into a stream of shopping cart microtransactions, we can help our brands take the lead and provide real content that people will appreciate (where relevant, of course!).

Pic via Diemkay

Zzzzzz

You may have noticed it's been a bit quiet here the past few weeks, normal service shall resume shortly! Been very busy and enjoying Easter :)

Spreading the love

If you want people to love your brand then you need to love your customers.
Rob Campbell has been telling a brilliant true story this week about how his nike client gave him a signed Wayne Rooney shirt to give to a cab driver that was a huge Manchester United fan.

Every brand should care like this.

When a man loves a campaign...

Disclosure - This is from the agency I work for, though I wasn't personally involved.

I love that moment when you walk around the office and see a great campaign idea and wonder if it will ever get approved, only to find it has already.

The campaign needed was to promote JT's MyCool Bolt-ons, so why not get their namesake to help promote them...?

I think it's great to find a celebrity campaign that doesn't take celebrity seriously, and to find a legend* of music who isn't afraid to have a joke.

*Not my musical cup of tea personally, but millions love him, seriously, his best selling album has sold over 15m copies!

TUPE or not TUPE

This has been a topic I've spoken about recently with people from a number of agencies. (Happily we were just discussing it not experiencing it.) We all came to the same conclusion that the IPA has, TUPE doesn't work.

The basis for it is sensible enough, in a business that frequently goes through hire/redundancy shifts, minimise the risk of disruption to people's lives by allowing them to move.

For most industries this makes perfect sense, but not adland.

For a start, if you just lost an account then the odds are you lost it for a reason. It's unlikely the client (whether for good reasons or bad) will want the same team running things at their new agency.

Even if the client liked the account team, different agencies work in different ways and people may not fit in well, which can just cause more problems down the line. What if you are being moved from a great agency to a rubbish one? In moving you create a divide between the people who have moved and those already at the agency, you may also prevent people at the new agency from being given legitimate opportunities to be promoted.

It's maybe ok if you work in Central London, but in the rest of the country it isn't... what if you are being TUPE'd from Leeds to Edinburgh?(or visa-versa, not intending to be rude to Scotland!) If you have a family then the odds are you won't even consider a move over that kind of distance. You end up causing more disruption in the moving process than you would in getting another job.

TUPE in adland is kind of like saying if the Tories lose the next general election some of their ministers should be TUPE'd across to Labour.

The principle is sound but in its' present form it just isn't right.

I wonder whether there is merit in a kind of 'Parachute Payments' system that eases agencies down, similar to that used when teams are relegated from the Premier League. Perhaps it could work by:

Every agency pays a small percentage of fees into an IPA administered pot. When you lose a client, the IPA pays a monthly sum based on the income that client brought in, to cover the employee wages, this decreases over 3-6 months, giving the agency time to try and find voluntary redundancies or new clients for the employee to work on. At the very least it gives the employee time to find a new job elsewhere.

By being IPA administered it would be even handed and drastically reduce the burden on staff at all levels when clients are lost.